Dissolving a Diamond in Piranha Solution—It Eats Everything!

okay today I'm going to be trying to do the impossible and dissolve diamonds so I have here two real diamonds so these are actual diamonds that were sent to me by a company called pure at birth and this company makes conflict-free diamonds but they are exactly the same chemically as natural diamonds so there's absolutely no difference between them chemically they have the exact same crystal structure and everything the exact same hardness clarity everything so before we see if we can actually dissolve diamond first let's figure out what diamond actually means why are diamonds so hard and so resistant to any chemical reaction now diamonds have the highest hardness and the highest thermal conductivity of any material in the world so diamonds are extremely hard and they're made a hundred percent out of carbon but I have something else here that's made a hundred percent out of carbon that's really soft so this is called graphite graphite is so soft that when you rub it on paper it flakes off and that's how you use a pencil to write on paper but with diamonds you would have no such luck so you're scratching out in the paper nothing rubs off and the reason it doesn't rub off is because it's harder than the paper and so the paper breaks instead of the diamond whereas in this case the graphite breaks instead of the paper so it writes on it so why is diamond so much harder than graphite if they're both completely made out of carbon well it has to do with how the atoms are stacked together in both of these materials so graphite is made out of carbon atoms that are connected to each other in this structure so I'm just writing some C's here for carbon and they're all bonded to each other like this so in graphite each carbon atom has three bonds associated with it so this Center one here you can see is bonded to this carbon this one and this one and the way it stacks up is it makes these flat sheets together so the carbon atoms that are in this sheet and this sheet they're not really bonded to each other they're only weakly bonded to each other and so these sheets can slide past each other so that's what makes graphite so soft and so even though these bonds are really strong these sheets I pass each other so easily that they can just flake off and you can write on paper with it but in diamond each carbon atom has four covalent bonds associated with it and it stacks up in this cubic structure so because carbon-carbon bonds are extremely strong and also because there's no sheets like in graphite that makes diamond the hardest material in the world but that doesn't mean you can't break diamond or destroy it if I just smash this with a hammer right now I could break it but they are pretty chemically resistant that's because carbon-carbon bonds are pretty hard to break but today I'm going to show you a solution that just might be able to break these bonds and dissolve diamond okay so in order to make this you start off with concentrated sulfuric acid now this stuff in and of itself is pretty nasty I poured it on some toilet paper a few videos ago and you saw how it completely turned that toilet paper into carbon so a dehydrated the toilet paper and left it with just pure carbon it took out all the oxygens and hydrogen's and turned them into water and just left the carbon there so the toilet paper was just left this dark black stump but that's not going to work for diamond because diamond is already pure carbon and so we need something else to be able to attack that carbon we need some oxygen atoms and so we're I'm going to get that oxygen from is hydrogen peroxide so I need about 50 mils of hydrogen peroxide now I'm going to slowly mix them together now this mixing is extremely exothermic so I have to be pretty careful in doing it so this was just room temperature before and now it's hot to the touch I would stick my thermometer in here to show you how hot it's getting but it would dissolve the thermometer so I'll show you what happens after I get this all mixed and what it can dissolve okay now watch what happens when I put a sponge in this [Music] it's just dissolving into nothing now it's a completely clear liquid again no sign of the sponge whatsoever that is crazy okay now watch what this stuff does to a hot dog three two one [Music] Oh cow [Music] look at that the hot dog has disappeared holy cow [Music] it's just turning to a clear liquid again it completely dissolved the hot dog into nothing that is amazing no way okay this stuff is insane okay look at that it is a clear liquid again that is crazy no way okay it just completely ate that hot dog and completely just turned it into carbon dioxide no trace left whatsoever okay so how is that even possible the sponge and the hot dog just dissolved and turned into thin air there was just clear liquid left after so where did it go well what happened to it is it just turned into water and carbon dioxide with nothing left the carbon dioxide bubbled off into the atmosphere and the water stayed in the jar there so when you just have sulfuric acid the sulfuric acid kind of acts like a catalyst to pull off the hydrogen's and oxygens of the material and turn it into water and it just leaves the carbon behind so that's one when you pour sulfuric acid on toilet paper for example it just leaves this charred black behind because that's the carbon leftover and the water was pulled out of it and evaporated into the air or fell into the jar below it so sulfuric acid can't really dissolve the carbon completely it kind of just leaves it there so we need something else to come in and take that carbon and turn it into carbon dioxide and that's where the hydrogen comes in so when you put concentrated hydrogen peroxide in sulfuric acid the sulfuric acid reacts with it and one of the products is an oxygen radical now oxygen radicals are extremely reactive this oxygen radical is what can combine with the leftover carbon that the sulfuric acid carbonized and it can react with that and turn it into carbon dioxide and that just bubbles out of solution so the fast reaction turns it into black stuff so the black stuff dissolves that's the carbon leftover but then the slower reaction eventually uses that oxygen radical to react with it and turn it into carbon dioxide that leaves into the atmosphere so it's kind of these two reactions going on so you put something in there with just carbon in it and it gets the water pulled off of it and the carbon is just left over then that carbon reacts and gets bubbled off as carbon dioxide until nothing's left whatsoever and that's why it's called piranha solution so the question is what if we put a different form of carbon in there like diamond can the oxygen radicals still get in there and react with it and get it to turn into carbon dioxide so now let's measure our diamond see how much it weighs so it's around point zero two grams and now let's put it in here see what happens [Music] [Music] okay let's see if any of it has dissolved it all I just rinsed it in some water I'm gonna dry it off so appoint all 1/8 grams so it does look like it lost a little bit of weight in there so the piranha solution might have been dissolving it I did see a very slight decrease but I'm unsure of the quality of my scale so it could have just been the variation the scale itself it was slightly less but I'm not sure that that was actually due to some of it dissolving off as carbon dioxide or not now I could leave it in there for a long time but eventually all of the hydrogen peroxide reacts and bubbles off as oxygen and so you can't really have a long-term solution of this hey everyone thanks for watching another episode of the action lab I hope you enjoyed it if you did and you haven't hit the subscribe button remember to subscribe and remember to hit the bell to be notified of my latest videos out I tend to look at the comments more right when my videos release so if you want to comment or give them any 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Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 937,272

Keywords: Diamond, dissolving diamond, burning diamond, liquid oxygen, piranha solution, piranha, dissolve, strong acid, acid, base, iphone in acid, techrax, the action lab, action lab, lab, action, vacuum chamber, lava, lava vs car, is diamond forever, forever diamond, destroying diamonds, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, chemical reaction, venus fly trap, hydraulic press, iron man, how to, vac man, cool science, foil ball, home science, science experiment, neutron star, zombie ant

Id: ikQRcePrWVI

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2019